That’s right…2014 BUILD conference has been announced. You can read the full details in Steve Guggenheimer’s post. Here’s the nutshell details: When: April 2-4, 2014 Where: Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA Why: Because you want to build awesome applications that run on awesome platforms that reach millions of people and devices! IMPORTANT REGISTRATION INFORMATION: Registration…

Whether your new to Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2013 or have used it since Pre-Beta TFS 2005, the Team Project Process Templates have always seemed to be something mystical to people. I often get asked “What does a task or test case relate to?” or “can I have a user story relate to another user…

June is going to be a busy time of people who follow Microsoft technology. We have two conferences that will occur: TechEd and //BUILD. IMO, TechEd is the Microsoft conference you attend if you want learn all about what’s current at Microsoft, best practices on solution building, and glimpses into products that are about to…

In a previous article, I talked about how TFS treats check-ins as atomic transactions. In a nutshell, when the check-in is initiated, Visual Studio will provide TFS with some basic information about the check-in. like the number of files and the work item(s) associated with it. When the transmission is complete, all the elements will…

Brian Keller has updated the Visual Studio 2012 ALM VM and hands-on labs to include VS 2012 Update 2. All labs have been revised slightly based on Update 2, with two labs gaining new exercises which demonstrate Update 2 capabilities. It’s a pretty large download and Brian offers a good technique for you to use…

When I talk to customers about how they keep track of changes of their source code, you may (or may not) be surprised with what I hear. They range from using some source code control management (SCCM) tool to archive files using ZIP or RAR files. Hopefully you’re using a SCCM tool. As part of…

One of the aspects of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is that its about process. The other two being people and products. Part of the process is managing the portfolio of projects an organization is responsible for, manage the people that can work on the projects, and keeping track of the tasks people are working on…

As a software developer, I always found that Windows Server was the better operating system to use because I had access to IIS, could install the full version of SQL Server, and most importantly, Hyper-V. When ever I first got a workstation and installed Windows Server on it, depending the version of Windows Server, I…

I’ve been talking to a lot of customers recently about Team Foundation Server (TFS) as a source code control management (SCCM) tool. Some are coming from Visual SourceSafe while others are coming from other SCCM tools. Regardless of what SCCM tool they’re coming from, the subject of branching always comes up, and the question of…

DevOps, as mentioned in one of my previous articles, is about Developer-Operations. One aspect of DevOps people overlook is about ensuring your building healthy systems. When I was previously responsible for Quality Assurance and Operations Developers, I become really focused on ensuring our team was building healthy systems, not just quality systems. What’s the difference…